In September, it was reported that Gavin Hood, the director of Tsotsi and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was developing a big screen adaptation of Orson Scott Card‘s award winning 1985 sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. The trades reported that Hood had rewritten a script that Card himself wrote and was developing the project to direct with a production company called Odd Lot Entertainment. Tonight Roberto Orci revealed on Twitter that he is involved in the project with writing/producer-partner Alex Kurtzman.

Kurtzman and Orci started off as writers on the television series Hercules and Xena, writers/producers on Alias, and more recently Fringe. They feature film credits include: The Island, The Legend of Zorro, Mission: Impossible III, Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Star Trek, and Cowboys & Aliens. They have recently been making the transition into producing, credits include Eagle Eye, Star Trek, and Cowboys & Aliens.

Are Orci and Kurtman doing a rewrite on the adaptation? While it isn’t completely clear in Ocri’s tweet, I believe that Orci and Kurtzman are aboard in a producing capacity only, with Hood directing from his own screenplay. I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like to me.

Update: I have confirmed that Orci/Kurtzman are only producing the project.

Previously:

Ender’s Game, is the story of a a boy nicknamed Ender who, at a very young age, is chosen to go into space for Battle School. Battle School is a place where adults train gifted children to be military leaders for an imminent war using zero gravity war games, interactive digital simulations and a whole bunch of cold-blooded precision and aggression. Wolfgang Petersen was attached to direct a film version for several years before that finally died and now it seems Hit the jump for more.

Here is the plot description from the book jacket:

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race’s next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn’t make the cut-young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.